Wednesday, February 27, 2013

The Allen Foundation offers Nutritional Research Grants to projects that primarily benefit programs for human nutrition in the areas of health, education, training, and research. The policies and priorities of the foundation are

to make grants to fund relevant nutritional research;

to support programs for the education and training of mothers during pregnancy and after the birth of their children, so that good nutritional habits can be formed at an early age;

to assist in the training of persons to work as educators and demonstrators of good nutritional practices;

to encourage the dissemination of information regarding healthful nutritional practices and habits; and

in limited situations, to make grants to help solve immediate emergency hunger and malnutrition problems.

The connections between diet and health remain a basic and primary priority, and consideration has always been given to projects that benefit nutritional programs in the areas of education, training, and research. Low priority has traditionally been given to proposals that help solve immediate or emergency hunger and malnutrition problems. The foundation does not under any circumstances sponsor professional conferences, seminar tables, discussion panels, or similar events. One specific hope of the board of trustees in the future is to encourage the inclusion of mandatory courses in nutrition in medical schools. Another desire is to bring the promise of nutrigenomics or nutritional genomics to realization, thus creating the possibility for empowering individuals to make informed choices based on genetic information for their diet in order to influence the balance between health and disease.Deadline: December 31, 2013Read full solicitation

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

The National Endowment for the Humanities’ Division of
Preservation and Access has offered Preservation Assistance Grants for
Smaller Institutions for more than a decade. These grants help small and
mid-sized cultural heritage institutions such as libraries, museums, historical
societies, archival repositories, town and county records offices, and colleges
and universities improve their ability to preserve and care for their
humanities collections. Awards of up to $6,000 support
preservation-related collection assessments, consultations, training and
workshops, and institutional and collaborative disaster and emergency
planning. Preservation Assistance Grants also support assessments of
digital collections, as well as education and training in standards and best
practices for digital preservation and the care and handling of collections
during digitization. NEH does not fund digitization or the development
of digital programs in this grant category.

The 2013 guidelines for Preservation Assistance Grants for
Smaller Institutions are available at http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/pag.html.
You will also find sample project descriptions, sample narratives, and a
list of frequently asked questions. The deadline for applications is May
1, 2013.

Friday, February 15, 2013

AERA Research Grants are available for faculty at institutions of higher education, postdoctoral researchers, and other doctoral-level scholars. Applications are encouraged from a variety of disciplines, such as but not limited to, education, sociology, economics, psychology, demography, statistics, and psychometrics.

The Governing Board for the AERA Grants Program has established the following four strands of emphasis for proposals. Applicants are encouraged to submit proposals that:

develop or benefit from new quantitative measures or methodological approaches for addressing education issues

Research projects related to at least one of the strands above and to science and/or mathematics education are especially encouraged. Other topics of interest include policies and practices related to student achievement in STEM, contextual factors in education, educational participation and persistence (kindergarten through graduate school), early childhood education, and postsecondary education. The research project must include the analysis of data from at least one of the large-scale, nationally or internationally representative data sets supported by NCES, NSF, or other federal agency, such as the U.S. Department of Labor, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the National Institutes of Health. Additional data sets may be used in conjunction with the obligatory federal data set. If international data sets are used, the study must include U.S. education.

Friday, February 8, 2013

Reports suggest that exposure to alcohol marketing on websites, through online videos and social networking sites, in video games and via mobile phone applications, is increasing (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2006), yet very little is known about the impact of these marketing strategies on alcohol-related attitudes and behaviors in young people.

The nature of the relationship between exposure to alcohol marketing, including traditional and Internet-based advertisements and promotions, and youth alcohol consumption remains unclear. While the existing research suggests that exposure to alcohol advertising might be associated with the initiation of alcohol consumption and the frequency/amount of alcohol consumed, direct evidence of a link between exposure to marketing and alcohol consumption among youth is generally lacking. In one of the few studies to assess whether exposure to alcohol in commercials and movies is directly related to actual drinking behavior, researchers in the Netherlands (Engels et al., 2009) divided 40 male college students (aged 18-29) into groups and exposed them to various combinations of movie clips and commercials involving high levels of alcohol or low levels of alcohol. Subjects were then allowed to self administer alcohol. Subjects shown movie clips depicting high levels of drinking and commercial advertisements for alcohol drank more alcohol than other participants. While intriguing, more research is needed to investigate the relationship between exposure to alcohol marketing and youth drinking and to examine factors that might mediate (explain) and moderate (influence the strength of) the relationship between exposure to various forms alcohol marketing and youth drinking.

Of particular interest are the following questions:

Is there a direct causal relationship between exposure to various forms of alcohol marketing and alcohol-related attitudes/behaviors among youth?

What social and psychological processes or mechanisms might underlie the effects of alcohol advertising and other promotions on youth drinking (e.g., extensive exposure, repetition of ads, discussion of advertisements among peers, etc.)?

What variables appear to mediate or moderate these effects (e.g., alcohol expectancies, family history, peer influence)? For instance, do advertisements and promotions have different effects among persons who have already initiated drinking relative to those who have not yet begun to drink, or on those who drink and reach criteria for abuse or dependence relative to those who do not meet such criteria?

How do alcohol advertisements influence brain activity, what mediates the responses, and how do such changes in brain function relate to the impact of alcohol advertisements on drinking?

Do baseline differences in existing brain and psychological functioning influence the impact of alcohol advertisements and other promotions on attitudes and beliefs regarding alcohol and alcohol consumption?

Are there differences in the influence of specific forms of alcohol advertisements and promotions (e.g., traditional versus Internet-based) on brain and psychological functioning and, if so, how might these differences influence the impact of advertising on youth drinking?

Studies examining simple correlations between exposure to alcohol advertisements and other promotions and rates of drinking are of less interest than those examining cause and effect relationships and exploring the specific mechanisms by which advertisements and promotions might affect drinking and related outcomes.

The NSF Sociology Program supports basic research on all forms of human social organization -- societies, institutions, groups and demography -- and processes of individual and institutional change. The Program encourages theoretically focused empirical investigations aimed at improving the explanation of fundamental social processes. Included is research on organizations and organizational behavior, population dynamics, social movements, social groups, labor force participation, stratification and mobility, family, social networks, socialization, gender roles, and the sociology of science and technology. The Program supports both original data collections and secondary data analysis that use the full range of quantitative and qualitative methodological tools. Theoretically grounded projects that offer methodological innovations and improvements for data collection and analysis are also welcomed.Deadline:August 15, 2013Read entire solicitation here.

Monday, February 4, 2013

The Foundation is currently accepting Online Funding Inquiries for its Core Funding Areas.In the charter establishing his Foundation, the late Sir John Templeton set out his philanthropic intentions under several broad headings. These Core Funding Areas continue to guide the Foundation's grantmaking as it works to find world-class researchers and project leaders to share in its pursuit of Sir John's dynamic, contrarian, forward-looking vision.

A number of topics - including creativity, freedom, gratitude, love, and purpose - can be found under more than one Core Funding Area. The Foundation welcomes proposals that bring together these overlapping elements, especially by combining the tools and approaches of different disciplines.